With the ever increasing growth in computational power of computing technology, devices can be built having computational capabilities exceeding the device's I/O throughput, thus creating a reserve of excess computing power. Strangely, networking companies continue to develop dedicated devices configured with a single functional purpose: networking. Networking devices, switches or routers for example, simply focus on providing data transport across a network, possibly at high data rates even exceeding 10 Gbit/s.
Data rates over network fabrics are becoming commensurate with computer bus speeds and have extremely low latency. For example, ER-1010E switches produced by Raptor Networks Technology Inc. can provide data transport across geographical distances with an aggregated link throughput of up to 80 Gbit/s with box latencies of less than 5 μs. Not only can such devices from a fabric that can serve as a computing bus among connected computing elements, but can also provide computational support as discussed in the Applicant's previous patent filings.
Networking fabric devices have barely begun to meet their full potential. Fabrics comprising suitably configured networking devices can extend their capabilities beyond mere data transport functions into myriad other types of applications including storing data, providing security, running computational simulations or models, searching, or other types of applications. Although the Applicant's previous patent filings touch on some of these application areas at a fabric level, there are still areas to be pursued at the device level. For example, an application can be deployed on a topology comprising of dedicated apparatus-level components operating together to provide support for the application's requirements. Each device can locally manage its contribution to one or more different types of topologies while still providing full data transport capabilities.
The following references describe previous effort put forth toward managing or configuring networking devices.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,702,717 to Jackson titled “Method and Apparatus for Controlling Management Agents in a Computer System on a Packet-Switched Input/Output Network” filed on Mar. 27, 2003, describes configuring nodes on a packet-switch network, where each node can have a plurality of processing cores. The processing nodes are able to run a subnet management agent, which can be moved from processing node to processing node.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,637,580 to Choquier et al. titled “System and Method Providing Virtual Applications Architecture” filed Jul. 20, 2005, discusses using a topology manager for managing applications across members of an architecture.
U.S. patent application publication 2010/0094981 to Cordray et al. titled “Dynamically Deployable Self Configuring Distributed Network Management System”, filed Oct. 13, 2009, discusses managing networks by automatically transferring management policies or applications upon detection of new devices.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,630,358 to Lakhani et al. titled “Mechanism for Implementing Multiple Logical Routers within a Single Physical Router”, filed Jul. 9, 2010, and discusses using a topology manager to provide routing tables to line cards in a router.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,0130,084 to Battou et al. titled “Multi-Tiered Control Architecture for Adaptive Optical Networks and Methods and Apparatus Therefor”, filed Feb. 28, 2001, describes a topology manager that keeps track of an arrangement of physical connectivity of switches in a network.
Interestingly, the above references fail to appreciate that a network fabric can operate as a computational application engine, where an application executing or otherwise operating within the fabric can function within its own application topology. Furthermore, these and other known approaches fail to address issues where different types of topologies can co-exist or interact with each other even at a component level of a single fabric apparatus. What has yet to be appreciated is that a single hybrid fabric apparatus (e.g., a switch, a line card, a chip, etc.) can include multiple routing or processing cores that can be individually dedicated to different topologies. Multiple fungible apparatus can cooperate together to form routing topologies configured for data transport while also supporting other application topologies (e.g., computation, storage, simulation, modeling, searching, etc.) at the same time.
Thus, there is still a need for hybrid routing-computation apparatus capable of supporting multiple computing application topologies.